30 Years of the Digest ... founded August 21, 1981

Add this Digest to your personal   or  

The Telecom Digest for January 25, 2012
Volume 31 : Issue 25 : "text" Format
Messages in this Issue:
Reactions to Jones v. United States (Monty Solomon)
Re: Cloud-based PBX service (Dave Platt)
Cameras May Open Up the Board Room to Hackers (Monty Solomon)
How Apple is sabotaging an open standard for digital books (Monty Solomon)
Judge: Americans can be forced to decrypt their laptops (danny burstein)
Apple's mind-bogglingly greedy and evil license agreement (Monty Solomon)
Re: A stake in the ground for IPv6 (Koos van den Hout)
Google announces privacy changes across products; users can't opt out (Monty Solomon)
Re: GOP Presidential Hopefuls Experiment With Mobile Ads (tlvp)
Iowa Senator cries "Foul" to LightSquared (Bill Horne)
Re: Some unanswered questions from January 2011 (Fred Goldstein)

====== 30 years of TELECOM Digest -- Founded August 21, 1981 ======

Telecom and VOIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) Digest for the Internet. All contents here are copyrighted by Bill Horne and the individual writers/correspondents. Articles may be used in other journals or newsgroups, provided the writer's name and the Digest are included in the fair use quote. By using any name or email address included herein for any reason other than responding to an article herein, you agree to pay a hundred dollars to that person, or email address owner.
Addresses herein are not to be added to any mailing list, nor to be sold or given away without the explicit written consent of the owner of that address. Chain letters, viruses, porn, spam, and miscellaneous junk are definitely unwelcome.

We must fight spam for the same reason we fight crime: not because we are naive enough to believe that we will ever stamp it out, but because we do not want the kind of world that results when no one stands against crime.  - Geoffrey Welsh


See the bottom of this issue for subscription and archive details and the name of our lawyer, and other stuff of interest.


Date: Tue, 24 Jan 2012 01:54:28 -0500 From: Monty Solomon <monty@roscom.com> To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org. Subject: Reactions to Jones v. United States Message-ID: <0ilqZD.A.slB.NOsHPB@telecom> Reactions to Jones v. United States: The government fared much better than everyone realizes Tom Goldstein SCOTUSblog January 23, 2012 Below, Lyle recaps and analyzes the Court's opinion. Given the significance of the decision and the uncertainty about its precise holding, I thought I would add a few thoughts. I think that the correct way to understand the case is to read it as having two separate majority opinions. This odd alignment occurs because Justice Sotomayor agrees with both theories: she agrees with the majority "at a minimum" (Sotomayor op. at 1) and also seemingly agrees with the concurrence's "incisive" conclusions (id. at 3). Justice Sotomayor does not formally join the Alito opinion, but her sympathy for its finding of a Fourth Amendment "search" in GPS monitoring is fairly obvious, as she expresses a broader view of privacy than any other member of the Court. ... http://goo.gl/1s99k United States v. Jones http://goo.gl/k32uI
Date: Mon, 23 Jan 2012 18:18:51 -0800 From: dplatt@radagast.org (Dave Platt) To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org. Subject: Re: Cloud-based PBX service Message-ID: <b1h1v8-lmk.ln1@radagast.org> In article <4F1DF1E2.30104@horne.net>, <tmetro+telecomdigest@gmail.com> wrote: > >I've been hoping that we'd see more open source apps in hosted form, and >we have seen some, but not really wide spread. Take for example virtual >PBXs. It's entirely feasible that we could have seen an "Asterisk >hosting" market develop much like web hosting, but it didn't happen. >There is maybe one vendor that I know of that provides Asterisk hosting. >The rest stick a proprietary GUI on top, or use an entirely proprietary >solution. If things don't work out with your PBX provider, there is no >way to download your config and prompts and upload them to another >provider. I suspect that this may because, at the moment, Asterisk configuration file editing and development is rather like sendmail.cf editing back a couple of decades ago. These config files do not define a high-level language with clarity of intention. Writing and debugging them is basically a process of writing and debugging machine code or (at best) assembly language, on a machine with a highly non-orthogonal instruction set, in a small boat on a storm-tossed ocean, while consuming large amounts of hallucinogenic drugs. A fun challenge for some of us... not so much for others... and difficult to support in an "easy start" hosting environment. The fact that the "virtual machine" can change significantly from one major Asterisk release to the next doesn't simplify matters, either. A lot of fairly low-level hacking and pain is required, if you don't use one of the "value-added" configuration GUIs. These seem to be at mostly proprietary... perhaps because they're a good deal of work to develop, may need somewhat different characteristics based on the specific market being served, and not enough people have had the time and energy to come together to develop a really outstanding open-source version. -- Dave Platt <dplatt@radagast.org> AE6EO Friends of Jade Warrior home page: http://www.radagast.org/jade-warrior I do not wish to receive unsolicited commercial email, and I will boycott any company which has the gall to send me such ads!
Date: Tue, 24 Jan 2012 00:21:59 -0500 From: Monty Solomon <monty@roscom.com> To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org. Subject: Cameras May Open Up the Board Room to Hackers Message-ID: <C0ApED.A.SlB.NOsHPB@telecom> Cameras May Open Up the Board Room to Hackers By NICOLE PERLROTH January 22, 2012 SAN FRANCISCO - One afternoon this month, a hacker took a tour of a dozen conference rooms around the globe via equipment that most every company has in those rooms; videoconferencing equipment. With the move of a mouse, he steered a camera around each room, occasionally zooming in with such precision that he could discern grooves in the wood and paint flecks on the wall. In one room, he zoomed out through a window, across a parking lot and into shrubbery some 50 yards away where a small animal could be seen burrowing underneath a bush. With such equipment, the hacker could have easily eavesdropped on privileged attorney-client conversations or read trade secrets on a report lying on the conference room table. In this case, the hacker was HD Moore, a chief security officer at Rapid7, a Boston based company that looks for security holes in computer systems that are used in devices like toaster ovens and Mars landing equipment. His latest find: videoconferencing equipment is often left vulnerable to hackers. Businesses collectively spend billions of dollars each year beefing up security on their computer systems and employee laptops. They agonize over the confidential information that employees send to their Gmail and Dropbox accounts and store on their iPads and smartphones. But rarely do they give much thought to the ease with which anyone can penetrate a videoconference room where their most guarded trade secrets are openly discussed. Mr. Moore has found it easy to get into several top venture capital and law firms, pharmaceutical and oil companies and courtrooms across the country. He even found a path into the Goldman Sachs boardroom. "The entry bar has fallen to the floor," said Mike Tuchen, chief executive of Rapid7. "These are literally some of the world's most important boardrooms - this is where their most critical meetings take place - and there could be silent attendees in all of them." ... http://goo.gl/6Quak
Date: Tue, 24 Jan 2012 18:43:56 -0500 From: Monty Solomon <monty@roscom.com> To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org. Subject: How Apple is sabotaging an open standard for digital books Message-ID: <SbcaaD.A.eFG.kh3HPB@telecom> How Apple is sabotaging an open standard for digital books By Ed Bott | January 22, 2012 Summary: For nearly two years, Apple has wooed digital book publishers and authors with its unconditional support of the open EPUB standard. With last week's introduction of iBooks 2.0, Apple has deliberately locked out that standard. Here's why you should care. ... http://goo.gl/HU0pw
Date: Tue, 24 Jan 2012 11:48:11 -0500 From: danny burstein <dannyb@panix.com> To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org. Subject: Judge: Americans can be forced to decrypt their laptops Message-ID: <Pine.NEB.4.64.1201241147470.1689@panix5.panix.com> [CNET] Judge: Americans can be forced to decrypt their laptops American citizens can be ordered to decrypt their PGP-scrambled hard drives for police to peruse for incriminating files, a federal judge in Colorado ruled today in what could become a precedent-setting case. Judge Robert Blackburn ordered a Peyton, Colo., woman to decrypt the hard drive of a Toshiba laptop computer no later than February 21--or face the consequences including contempt of court. Blackburn, a George W. Bush appointee, ruled that the Fifth Amendment posed no barrier to his decryption order. The Fifth Amendment says that nobody may be "compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself," which has become known as the right to avoid self-incrimination. "I find and conclude that the Fifth Amendment is not implicated by requiring production of the unencrypted contents of the Toshiba Satellite M305 laptop computer," Blackburn wrote in a 10-page opinion today. He said the All Writs Act, which dates back to 1789 and has been used to require telephone companies to aid in surveillance, could be invoked in forcing decryption of hard drives as well. ---- http://goo.gl/PYkbt _____________________________________________________ Knowledge may be power, but communications is the key dannyb@panix.com [to foil spammers, my address has been double rot-13 encoded]
Date: Tue, 24 Jan 2012 18:43:56 -0500 From: Monty Solomon <monty@roscom.com> To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org. Subject: Apple's mind-bogglingly greedy and evil license agreement Message-ID: <0r13fD.A.EFG.kh3HPB@telecom> Apple's mind-bogglingly greedy and evil license agreement By Ed Bott | January 19, 2012 Summary: Over the years, I have read hundreds of license agreements, looking for little gotchas and clear descriptions of rights. But I have never, ever seen a legal document like the one Apple has attached to its new iBooks Author program. ... http://goo.gl/QqxK5
Date: Tue, 24 Jan 2012 18:43:53 +0000 (UTC) From: Koos van den Hout <koos+newsposting@kzdoos.xs4all.nl> To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org. Subject: Re: A stake in the ground for IPv6 Message-ID: <jfmu59$jpq$6@kzdoos.xs4all.nl> Doug McIntyre <merlyn@geeks.org> wrote in <4f1cf2d8$0$79803$8046368a@newsreader.iphouse.net>: > If your ISP supports PPPoE (Qwest/Centurylink does), you most likely > can put your integrated DSL modem/router into a bridge mode, and > do the layer-3 termination on any device you choose beyond the bridge.. That's what I do (well, with pptp, because that is what my older ADSL2 modem supports). > The biggest problem with DSL is that almost nothing in the consumer > grade market supports IPv6 native for the DSL Modem/combo router. > Even the latest boxes, let alone anything in the past. There are a few > lesser brands mostly in Europe that do. In particular: AVM - all the latest Fritz! boxes support IPv6. As tunnels (like hurricane electric) or as DHCP-PD or 6RD. Technicolor - seems to have a new model supporting a form of IPv6, probably DHCP-PD, but all I know is hearsay. 6RD is a method of configuring IPv6 by 'piggybacking' on IPv4 dhcp requests. DHCP-PD (prefix delegation) is a method of configuring IPv6 independently of the IPv4 network. Koos -- Koos van den Hout, PGP keyid DSS/1024 0xF0D7C263 via keyservers koos@kzdoos.xs4all.nl Weather maps from free sources at http://idefix.net/ http://weather.idefix.net/
Date: Tue, 24 Jan 2012 17:41:50 -0500 From: Monty Solomon <monty@roscom.com> To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org. Subject: Google announces privacy changes across products; users can't opt out Message-ID: <kEJDxB.A.qEG.kh3HPB@telecom> Google announces privacy changes across products; users can't opt out By Cecilia Kang, Tuesday, January 24, 4:33 PM Google said Tuesday it will require users to allow the company to follow their activities across e-mail, search, YouTube and other services, a radical shift in strategy that is expected to invite greater scrutiny of its privacy and competitive practices. The information will enable Google to develop a fuller picture of how people use its growing empire of Web sites. Consumers will have no choice but to accept the changes. The policy will take effect March 1 and will also impact Android mobile phone users, who are required to log in to Google accounts when they activate their phones. ... http://goo.gl/heDNX
Date: Tue, 24 Jan 2012 20:15:53 -0500 From: tlvp <mPiOsUcB.EtLlLvEp@att.net> To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org. Subject: Re: GOP Presidential Hopefuls Experiment With Mobile Ads Message-ID: <1o62eridku58g.erbcu47oxnyb$.dlg@40tude.net> On Mon, 23 Jan 2012 14:32:17 -0500, Monty Solomon wrote: > Spending on mobile ads by political campaigns this election cycle > will take up only a fraction of candidates' war chests, but the > digital teams of GOP presidential hopefuls are busily experimenting ... Please, no unsolicited SMS or MMS, at the carriers' current per message charges, unless they can be delivered as "sender-prepaid". Cheers, -- tlvp -- Avant de repondre, jeter la poubelle, SVP.
Date: Tue, 24 Jan 2012 21:32:38 -0500 From: Bill Horne <bill@horneQRM.net> To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org. Subject: Iowa Senator cries "Foul" to LightSquared Message-ID: <20120125023238.GA22601@telecom.csail.mit.edu> Falcone fiasco Billionaire tried to buy LightSquared OK: Sen. By KAJA WHITEHOUSE New York Post New York billionaire hedge fund titan Phil Falcone's LightSquared 4G venture, in danger of not getting the nod from Uncle Sam, tried to buy the approval of a key lawmaker, according to a shocking letter the senator released yesterday. Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), who is leading a Capitol Hill inquiry into how the government came to give the project a partial approval, said a representative of LightSquared earlier this month promised a staffer that the lawmaker's support for the wireless program could cement a Midwest call center, "possibly in Iowa." Rest is at: http://goo.gl/lX5we -- Bill Horne (Remove QRM from my email address to write to me directly)
Date: Tue, 24 Jan 2012 22:09:37 -0500 From: Fred Goldstein <fgoldstein.SeeSigSpambait@wn2.wn.net> To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org. Subject: Re: Some unanswered questions from January 2011 Message-ID: <qS9cPC.A.DMG.Qx3HPB@telecom> On Mon, 23 Jan 2012 20:08:57, Garrett Wollman wrote, ... >In article <iCp5p.A.-iB.0BaHPB@telecom>, >Fred Goldstein <fgoldstein.SeeSigSpambait@wn2.wn.net> wrote: > >The correct answer, of course, is to phase out TCP/IP and move to > >RINA > >What's your non-fantasy solution? Longer term, RINA. It will become available (sorry, no date yet) and will be simpler to use than TCP/IP, and adopting it will be simpler than the misbegotten transition to IPv6. Short term, learn from the basic research that John Day did, that went into RINA. See his book "Patterns in Network Architecture". It helps you deal with TCP/IP too. The basic lesson is that multiple layers do the same thing (the pattern that recurses). But the original 1970s designers of TCP/IP and the OSIRM (Day was its Rapporteur some years after it was first designed) had the idea, in error, that the purpose of the protocol stack was to do everything only once. So the TCP/IP layers were groups of functions, not true layers, which are black boxes. So treat TCP and IP together (they started out as one protocol and should be seen as one layer, with no boundary between them) as a sort of DIF. Treat the IP address as a private matter to it. Then you can converge another instance of TCP+IP atop it (or use UDP; it only exists because the port number was erroneously put in TCP, when it belonged in IP) if you need to -- hmmm, that's sort of what IPSec does. Now view NAT as a simple function of the TCP+IP layer. Now make the application use only names, no IP addresses inside the application protocol. Because DNS is done by the application, servers need non-NAT addresses for now, since their IP address forms part of the actual name, but bear in mind that it's an error in the stack design, a huge layering violation. And try to use applications that pass along actual names, as HTTP does. When you embrace or accept NAT as a local matter to one layer, you become liberated from the need to use IPv6. That's worth the price of admission, to carry you over until RINA (which passes the actual name down the stack via its API, and has no other global addresses since they're always local to a layer) is ready. This is quite realistic. That IPv6 will actually replace IPv4 is the fantasy. They've been trying for close to 20 years. -- Fred Goldstein k1io fgoldstein "at" ionary.com ionary Consulting http://www.ionary.com/ +1 617 795 2701 ***** Moderator's Note ***** I allowed Mr. Wollman's criticism of Fred's OP, so Fred has a right to respond. But, this has gotten beyond telecom (i.e., the impact of NAT on SIP), so I'm closing the thread and setting followups to comp.protocols.tcp-ip. Bill Horne Moderator
TELECOM Digest is an electronic journal devoted mostly to telecom- munications topics. It is circulated anywhere there is email, in addition to Usenet, where it appears as the moderated newsgroup 'comp.dcom.telecom'. TELECOM Digest is a not-for-profit, mostly non-commercial educational service offered to the Internet by Bill Horne. All the contents of the Digest are compilation-copyrighted. You may reprint articles in some other media on an occasional basis, but please attribute my work and that of the original author. The Telecom Digest is moderated by Bill Horne.
Contact information: Bill Horne
Telecom Digest
43 Deerfield Road
Sharon MA 02067-2301
863-455-9426
bill at horne dot net
Subscribe: telecom-request@telecom-digest.org?body=subscribe telecom
Unsubscribe: telecom-request@telecom-digest.org?body=unsubscribe telecom
This Digest is the oldest continuing e-journal about telecomm-
unications on the Internet, having been founded in August, 1981 and
published continuously since then.  Our archives are available for
your review/research. We believe we are the oldest e-zine/mailing list
on the internet in any category!

URL information: http://telecom-digest.org


Copyright (C) 2012 TELECOM Digest. All rights reserved.
Our attorney is Bill Levant, of Blue Bell, PA.

Finally, the Digest is funded by gifts from generous readers such as yourself who provide funding in amounts deemed appropriate. Your help is important and appreciated. A suggested donation of fifty dollars per year per reader is considered appropriate. See our address above. Please make at least a single donation to cover the cost of processing your name to the mailing list. All opinions expressed herein are deemed to be those of the author. Any organizations listed are for identification purposes only and messages should not be considered any official expression by the organization.

End of The Telecom Digest (11 messages)

Return to Archives ** Older Issues